At least for Mastodon comments, there are two easy ways:

- Run the comments on an instance you moderate

- Even better, only show comments that your account has favourited.

More details on the last one here:

https://hci.social/@ryanatkn/111983960076822015

Bluesky allows thread owners to hide posts from the thread.

Presumably the blog interface itself can choose to simply not surface hidden replies at all; if you view the thread via a different client (eg the Bluesky app) you would have the option of seeing the hidden posts.

And of course if you view the thread through your own Bluesky interface your personal blocklists and moderation would apply to the thread.

I'm not sure if this implements it, but Bluesky has an API to hide replies (called thread gating). It's a separate API call though, so you don't get it automatically when loading a thread via the API.

I built a web component for the same purpose, and you can see in there how I implemented threadgating: https://github.com/ascorbic/bluesky-comments-tag

As of this comment, Bluesky has ~38M users. To sign up is trivial, and doesn't constrain you to folks who already have a Github account or would sign up for one (tech weighted). Skate to where the puck is going. I suppose including a link to the Bluesky sign up page near the discussion section of a post would be helpful, for those not yet onboarded who want to immediately discuss or intend to in the future.

https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

EDIT: Ask five people you know outside of tech if they have a Github account. Everyone I know outside of tech moved to Bluesky from Twitter. No one I know outside of tech has a Github account. If I encounter someone who has neither, I'm of course going to recommend a Bluesky account from a utility perspective, as they're likely never going to contribute code, issues, discussion on GH if not a tech person. (most of my network is non tech, non startup, non SV people, ymmv; HN is the closest I get to tech folks most of the time)

You can host your own Bluesky instance and federate across instances, with all the data you host stored in an open an portable format, can you do the same with GitHub?

"Protocols, not platforms." As the kids say, "build mode" but building what can't be captured, enshittified, etc.

I hesitate to give one corporation or entity too much credit, but at least for the moment, the community on Blueksy is pretty fun. Admittedly, I was a fan of the Twitter of old, and that seems to be the crowd that is most active on Bluesky now. We'll see where it goes.

Unless of course you say something that pisses off the BS mod cabal, or you are deliberately mass-reported by some clique of users, then your account will be immediately banned. Or even worse, your account made it onto some pre-shared blacklist so you'll be invisible before you say a word.

BS is an attempt to recreate an even more toxic environment than old Twitter ever was.

Which is all very high school cafeteria-drama.

To be clear, so is blue sky – you can run a Bluesky server yourself just like mastodon

Beyond this, BlueSky definitely kicks a lot of Libertarian and Right-leaning users off the platform. It seems to be okay if you're left of center or politically agnostic.

If interested in understanding this topic in detail, https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net has information on running your own relay network, migrating data, etc as it relates to Bluesky and AT Proto. Work continues to enable data migration, portability, alternate relay networks, etc. https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t is particularly relevant.

(blog author works at bluesky, no affiliation personally)

So. You can back up your personal data to what is effectively a fancy tar ball (technically it's a collection of CAR files akin to what IPFS uses) and you can restore that to any PDS (personal data server) when you point your account there (either via your did:plc doc or via DNS records via did:web). So even if your current PDS implodes or bans you, you can just go somewhere else.

And of course there are several implementations and hosts for relays (the gossip nodes), PDS implementations, clients, and appviews (the server backend for bluesky the web app).

So strictly speaking if bluesky imploded tomorrow you could just use a self hosted version of the same app or use someone else's (such as https://zeppelin.social).

The PLC directory is still technically in bluesky's hands but is being transferred an independent foundation atm and could be trivially forked if needed. And of course if you use did:web that doesn't apply to you and you just depend on DNS.